Snap Schedule Employee Scheduling Software: FAQs

Product Features & Benefits

Owners and managers of any business that has employees. If you need to schedule your employees, you need Snap Schedule.

Bring the Power of Snap Schedule Online Employee Scheduling to Your Team

Go beyond scheduling and get the features you need to boost productivity, automate call-out and shift trade, comply with union/labor rules, and empower employees with more control over their schedules via self-service.

Certainly. Snap Schedule comes with a growing number of pre-designed schedule plans that include alternative work schedules like 4/10 and 5/4/9 as well as the traditional 9-to-5 schedule. Please visit our Snap Schedule Learning Center (http://community.bmscentral.com) Web site for tutorials, videos, examples, tips and techniques, employee scheduling community feedback, and comparisons of different shift scheduling strategies.

Snap Schedule’s shift and employee forms have a tab that opens 25 Custom Fields, in addition to two to five tabs of optional data. There are 10 Custom Text fields, 5 Custom Number fields, 5 Custom Check Boxes, and 5 Custom Dates for each form.

Label Custom Fields with whatever names fit your business. Show or hide them. You can even format Text and Number fields to accept only specific formats, e.g., telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, file path, or a Social Security Number, money, percentages, or other patterns.

Snap Schedule uses a perpetual calendar for shift assignments so there is no limit and you can schedule as far into the future as you need. Snap Schedule keeps all employees, shifts, and scheduling information in a single SQL Server database file. This file will grow automatically to accommodate any shifts, holidays, vacations and time-off requests you recorded and allow you to go forward or backward in time to instantly see and assess how you are doing.

Yes. Scheduling is really a multi-dimensional problem and you really need to be able to view the schedule from multiple vantage points. Snap Schedule provides three distinct views to accommodate that as well as selectable date ranges within each view. The Daily view shows all shift and time off assignments for each employee for each day in the specified period. The Shift view shows employee staffing for each shift along with coverage summary for each job position. The Calendar view presents work and time off assignments for each employee similar to a calendar or monthly planner.

Snap Schedule is intuitive and adaptable. If you know how to use Microsoft Office 2007 programs, you can use the same skills to use Snap Schedule. If you are new to Office, you will find that Snap Schedule’s friendly user interface makes it easy to discover commands and features that otherwise might have been hidden beneath layers of toolbars and menus. The graphical screen layout is designed to help you quickly find the commands you need to complete a task and reflect the way you do scheduling. When you move the mouse over a command button, Snap Schedule shows a Super Tooltip pop up that explains the button’s function through just a few lines of text.

Easily assign shifts, mark time off, move or copy assignments with a simple drag & drop. Even split shifts, multiple shifts, paid/unpaid time off, and on calls are all supported.

Certainly. You can schedule with confidence because Snap Schedule automatically alerts you to any scheduling conflicts. Snap Schedule checks to determine if an employee shift assignment conflicts with other shift assignments, time off, employee availability, or your business’ operating schedules. When a conflict is detected, Snap Schedule displays the appropriate warning flag in each affected assignment. You can also run the Shift Assignment Validation report for a more in depth analysis of work hour constraints that you define, like the number of consecutive work days, maximum daily/weekly work hours, overtime, and minimum required work hours.

You can attach a note of up to 256 characters in free form to each shift assignment. Additionally, you can define a list of commonly used shift assignment reasons and choose one from the list when you want to add details to a shift assignment. This way, you save time and the reasons can be used to group and filter assignments.

Yes. On call shift assignments occur when an employee is instructed by appropriate management to remain available to be called to work during an off-duty period. When you mark a shift assignment as on call, the shift duration is not included in the total work hour calculations.

Snap Schedule’s Shift Coverage Planner displays the number of people scheduled by position for each shift and lets you quickly see if any position is over/under staffed while making shift assignments. Snap Schedule automatically computes and displays the assigned head counts and variances for comparison with the required head count. The variances are color coded to help you easily identify whether the assigned head counts are over or under.

Yes. For each employee, you can specify how many hours per week the employee desires to work and when the employee is available to work. Snap Schedule use this information to alert you when you schedule an employee to work when he/she is not available or has exceeded the work hour limits.

Schedule Setup

Yes. You can have as many locations as you like. A location is a work site or a place where the shift is performed. You can authorize your employees to work at certain locations but not others. Snap Schedule will alert you when an employee is scheduled to work at a location where he/she is not authorized to work.

Yes. If you are using Intuit QuickBooks, Microsoft Office Accounting 2007, or have employee information available in Excel, you can save time by using the Snap Schedule Import Data Wizard to import employee name, identification, and contact information.

Yes. If the schedule file is located on a network and there are multiple users trying to open the schedule file, the user who first opens the file will have total control and can save any modifications back to the file. Other users can only open the file in Read Only mode.

Auto-Scheduling

Yes. You can easily model and generate any fixed and rotating shift schedule using user-definable shift patterns and rotation tables. Snap Schedule’s built-in visual tools for schedule design let you see the days on/off patterns in graphical format and the total work hours.

Yes. Once you have designed your shifts and rotation patterns (i.e. your schedule plan), you can generate employee work schedules automatically from your schedule plan for any time period. Preview the generated work schedules and make changes as necessary before committing assignments to the schedule file.

Snap Schedule comes with a growing number of pre-designed plans that cover continuous 24/7 as well as regular and compressed work week operations. With its pre-designed schedule plans, creating a new schedule is easy – select a plan, answer a few questions, and Snap Schedule does the rest! Unless your operation is one of a kind, chances are you will find a schedule that will fit your needs. All pre-designed schedule plans can be modified to suit your needs.

Yes. With Snap Schedule, you can copy a schedule for a range of dates and paste it to any date in one step. You can select to copy shift assignments, time off, shift coverage requirements, or everything.

Publish & Email Schedules and Reports

Yes. The E-mail Schedules wizard lets you e-mail shift assignment schedules to all or selected employees. Each e-mail can contain the employee’s personal schedule or schedule information of all selected employees. You have the option of including an iCalendar formatted file that contains the employee’s personal schedule so your employees can import their schedules into their calendar programs or PDAs.

You can produce 7 day or monthly work calendar for each employee using the Employee Weekly Calendar or the Employee Monthly Calendar report. For each day on the calendar, the shift assignments are listed first in the order of shift start time, followed by any time off assignments.

Yes. Use the Time Off Details by Employee report to print or export a list of your employees’ scheduled time off. For each employee, the time off assignments are listed to show the date, time off reason, time off period, payable hours and non-payable hours.

Snap Schedule Does Far More than Employee Scheduling

Snap Schedule simplifies the way employee records are managed and makes important data such as contact information, availability, position, authorized work locations, and skills available at your fingertips. Additionally, you can define up to 25 custom data fields to keep track of anything you choose about the employee. You have scheduling and employee information all in one place for complete reporting and analysis. Contacting replacements for no-shows or scheduling employees with the proper skills, seniority, or training is quick and easy once you have the information entered.

Snap Schedule substantially reduces the time and the paperwork required to track and assign employee vacation and time off requests. You can define as many time-off reasons as you like and simply drag and drop a reason on to the schedule planner to mark when an employee will be absent. Snap Schedule keeps you up to date on who’s not coming in to work and why. Its comprehensive reports provide details on planned vacation and time off hours for any time period you select.

Snap Schedule helps you keep track of and report on labor costs for any given time period. The Estimated Labor Cost Summary shows a break down of regular work hours, overtime work hours, regular work labor cost, overtime work labor cost, payable time off hours, and payable time off cost. The overtime hours and overtime costs are calculated based on the assigned shift work hours and the overtime settings you have defined for your business. The payable time off hours and payable time off costs are calculated based on the time off taken by the employee that is payable. The Estimated Labor Cost by Employee report displays similar cost data for each day an employee is scheduled to work.

Snap Schedule helps you keep track of overtime hours, control the hours an employee is allowed to work each day or week, and ensure that the maximum work hours per day, per week or the number of consecutive work days are not exceeded.

Yes! Snap Schedule includes 16 standard—and highly modifiable—reports covering every facet of employee scheduling. Include/exclude fields, sort, filter and tailor them to fit your way of scheduling. Additionally, you can create and save innumerable Custom Reports. Print Daily, Shift, and Calendar schedules, as well as shift assignment reports to communicate schedule information to your employees. Easily publish schedules and any report in PDF and a variety of other for-mats. Reports are active, meaning you can drill-down on embedded hyperlinks for more details and make changes to the underlying data.

Comparing Snap Schedule with Other Ways to Manage

Maybe you’re not. Count all the hours you spent last year, and will spend next year. How inflexible and time-consuming is changing the schedules when someone is out? Snap Schedule saves you time by dragging and dropping rather than erasing and writing. It will also help you prevent under and over staffing, schedule conflicts, and reduce your overtime and labor costs. And pencil and paper cannot autodial or email your employees or create reports. It can’t change views to weeks, full month, and it can’t show you just Joe’s or Sue’s schedules. Doing these tasks by hand is very time consuming and difficult due to workload fluctuations, frequent special requests from employees, last minute changes, and high employee turnover. Without the right tools in place, you will expend a great deal of time on these tasks — time better spent on more critical, revenue-generating activities.

Using Excel templates for scheduling is definitely better than using pencil-and-paper but considering the price you would pay for Excel and scheduling templates, you get much more with Snap Schedule. Scheduling is really a multi-dimensional problem that cannot be represented in a 2-dimension row and column format. There are employees, shifts, and dates – and you really need to be able to view the schedule from multiple vantage points. You will spend many unnecessary hours to work around Excel limitations because unlike Snap Schedule, Excel is not specifically designed for employee shift scheduling.

If your scheduling software is more than one year old, it probably handles less than half of what Snap Schedule does, and it’s not built on tools as advanced and reliable as Microsoft SQL Server and .NET 2.0. This means you get a modern, seamlessly integrated, rock-solid software tool that will save you time and money.

Contrast the ease of use and thoroughness of Snap Schedule’s scheduling functions to those in your current solution. Then look at all the other tasks Snap Schedule does for you like employee information management, emailing, overtime and labor costs monitoring, management reporting, etc. Your current software probably is not designed to take full advantage of the latest Microsoft Office 2007 user interface, graphical presentation, and drag-and-drop scheduling. Every scheduling chore that now takes you three or four administrative minutes—and add up to hours—can suddenly take you seconds.

Pricing & Licensing

Snap Schedule is licensed on a per-computer basis. Per-computer licensing means a valid license must be obtained for each computer that runs the software. For example, if you want to install Snap Schedule and run it on three computers, you will need to buy three licenses, one for each computer.

Your first, single PC license, for one copy of Snap Schedule is $450 USD. If you plan to run Snap Schedule on multiple computers for your business, we offer discounted pricing for multiple licenses. Visit our online store for the latest pricing information. There you can place an order and pay for it with a credit card. Once we receive your online order you will receive via e-mail a product key to unlock the 30-day evaluation software you currently have installed on your machine and turn it into a permanent use license.

When you purchase Snap Schedule, you can use the licensed software version as long as you own your computer. Unlike ASP, Web-based, or managed services, you don’t pay any subscription or a monthly fee to use Snap Schedule.

Reliability and Technology

The engineering and software development professionals who developed Snap Schedule have previously won five Microsoft awards in four years for business software excellence. Their software products won over business partners such as Intuit, IBM and Compaq. Their product was featured on a CNN Town Meeting. Microsoft acquired that product and still markets it worldwide.

Yes, because Snap Schedule is built on Microsoft’s latest SQL Server database technologies (SQL Server CE is included). Competing products are not using a database or built on the older, little-known database. Microsoft SQL Server delivers better stability and flexibility for growth.

Snap Schedule is also built upon Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, which enables developers to rely upon proven software tools, rather than continually reinvent new code. It has passed three Microsoft Platform Tests for ISV Solutions (Windows Client, Managed Code, and Office 2007) conducted by VeriTest as well as the Intuit QuickBooks Technical Review.

If you have Bootcamp installed on an Apple computer running MAC OS X, you can run Windows-based programs including Snap Schedule on a Mac. Snap Schedule is a Windows-based application and will not run on a Mac without Bootcamp installed.

In addition, virtualization products such as VMWare Fusion and Parallels allow you to run Windows applications directly on your Mac. Using products such as these, it is quite easy to run Snap Schedule on your Mac.